Program Portfolio News Mentor Worldwide Mentor Arabia Mentor in Denmark Mentor Germany Mentor Latvia Mentor Lithuania. My Mentor Made Me Dream Bigger and Believe in Myself Do you want to become the next Michael Kors even though it's notoriously. Step Four: Register Your Program in MENTOR’s Mentoring Connector After your program is established, register it in the Mentoring Connector to help you recruit more mentors and increase visibility for your organization. Thousands of prospective mentors visit our.
How to Start a Mentoring Program - Human Resources - mentor. Starting a mentoring program might be the closest you'll ever get to making a business decision that has exclusively positive impact. Mentoring can improve employee satisfaction and retention, enrich new- employee initiation, make your company more appealing to recruits, and train your leaders. And the best part is, it's free. Unlike similar learning incentives like training programs or offering to pay for courses, mentoring utilizes the resources that your company already has. Here's how to get started.
How to Start a Mentoring Program: Creating a Structure. The first step anyone thinking about starting a mentoring program should take is to define what the objective of the program will be. If you are aiming for higher minority retention rates, your program will be structured differently than if you were trying to develop leaders, teach a specific skill, or welcome newcomers to your organization. In order to develop a program that best fit Morgan Stanley's goal—to retain women employees in sales—Barbara Adolf, who has since founded a human services consultancy in New York, started by choosing a group of leaders from different departments in the company to brainstorm a curriculum, and list what makes employees successful at the company, for mentoring sessions.
- Welcome To Walmart Careers Launch your career with the Fortune #1 company. As the world’s largest retailer, Walmart offers the opportunity for personal and professional growth on an unprecedented scale. Search now for jobs that match your passion and your.
- Wal-Mart employee Ernest Reed (left) checks on a cereal display at the Washington, D.C., location where he works. He was one of about 23,000 people who applied for hundreds of job openings when Wal-Mart first arrived in D.C.
- Companies who adopt formal mentor programs, such as wal-Mart’s Mentor Me program, are creating a structure that helps people navigate through the company culture while giving everyone permission to fully activate a mentormentee relationship.
Since there were more women who wanted to be mentored than available mentors, the mentees were put into groups with two mentors as facilitators. But when Michelle Ferguson, the senior vice president of international operations of Mc. Graw- Hill Education, developed a program that originally had a similar goal for its mentoring program, she ended up with a completely different format. In her program, women could choose their own goals—anything from work/life balance to specific industry acumen—and the company matched mentors and mentees based on who could best help achieve the goals. The mentors and mentees met individually for between one and three hours every month for a year.
Lois Zachary, the president of a leadership development and mentoring consultancy called Leadership Development Services in Phoenix. If your company is extremely formal, it might be best to have a formal application process, minimum time requirements, and set durations for the mentoring relationship (typically mentoring relationships last between six months and two years, depending on the goal of the mentee). If your company is informal, it might be okay to match people up and then let them figure out the logistics.
But it's important to put at least minimal guidelines in place. No matter what degree of formality your program takes on, you need someone to champion the project and check- up on how well its guidelines are being followed. Dig Deeper: Using Mentors to Build Loyalty How to Start a Mentoring Program: Pairing. Some companies, like Morgan Stanley, use group mentoring. Others use peer mentoring, bring in an expert for facilitated mentoring, have lower- level employees teach higher- level employees in reverse mentoring, or even use a speed- dating format for . There are some companies that actually purchase from vendors that have created these algorithms that are used to match mentors and prot. But she says the programs in which the participants have some input are usually the most successful.
One way of allowing input might be to have mentors and mentees fill out an information sheet about what they hope to offer or obtain from a mentoring relationship. Mc. Graw- Hill has a system for making mentoring matches that includes a questionnaire, phone interview, and committee recommendation for each mentor and mentee. Another way may be to offer the mentor or mentee several options for a partner and allow them to choose one. Liz Selzer, a consultant with a California- based consultancy called The Mentoring Group, oversees leadership development for more than 3. She suggests matching people based on who they'll get along with best. But just in case a pair doesn't click, one of the most important things to remember is to set up a way for people to get out of the relationship and find another match without hurt feelings.
One way to do this might be to set up a . If there is a serious problem, find the mentee a new mentor. Dig Deeper: How to Find a Business Mentor.
How to Start a Mentoring Program: Training. You've established what goals a mentoring program can achieve for your company, set up a structure that fits your company culture, and now you are sending your matched pairs off to work. If you want positive results, it's a good idea to help them learn what . You can have a classroom- style discussion, you can hire someone like Zachary to host a . But no matter how you do it, here are the points you want to hit during your training time: Explain why mentoring isn't a waste of time. When Selzer was assigned her first mentor, she thought it would be a waste of time. Fortunately, she needed to participate in order to obtain her graduate degree, and she soon learned to see the relationship as invaluable.
Although she was forced to start her first mentoring relationship, she doesn't suggest making your program mandatory. Instead, explain to people why they should choose to participate. Find people in your company who are willing to share the mentoring experiences that have made a positive impact on their careers. People might think, 'this is the person who is going to get me promoted, get me this, get me that,' so it's really important to identify to participants what the objectives are and what to expect, as well as not to expect, from it.
But it's helpful to at least make a suggestion for how the mentoring pairs can get the most out of their relationship. Zachary suggests mentoring relationships follow this cycle: preparation, establishing agreements, enabling, and closure. In the preparation phase, the mentor and mentee have a conversation about their expectations, confidentiality, and the boundaries of the relationship. In the establishing agreements phase, the mentor helps the mentee work out a plan, with clear tasks, for achieving his or her goal. The enabling phase is when the work happens. The mentor supports the mentee in following his or her plan as well as provides feedback and accountability.
Closure is a planned ending to the relationship. You can also use it as an opportunity to celebrate success.
Some specific tasks you can suggest mentoring pairs put in a plan to achieve a goal are journaling, role- playing, or having mentors watch mentees at whatever skill they are trying to improve, such as leading a meeting, and giving their feedback. Dig Deeper: The Truth About Mentoring How to Start a Mentoring Program: Keys to Success. Make sure everyone in your organization knows that mentoring is going on. Preferably, the leaders of the organization should play a large role in this.
Ask mentors and mentees how their experiences went. Look at productivity and measurable improvement in the areas that your program was targeting. Dig Deeper: Mentees on Mentors.
Resources. A guide to preparing for a mentoring relationship: http: //www. The Mentoring Group's guide to effective mentoring: http: //www. SCORE, a resource partner with the U. S. Small Business Administration, will help you get set up with a mentor for free: http: //www.